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Comment by emmanuel_1234 | Hacker News Reader

This reads like a disguised ad for AirGradient, which pops up here every now and then. I fell for it because it claimed to be "open". Well, although it is definitely more "open" than most, it feels like an afterthought.

See for example this: https://forum.airgradient.com/t/airgradient-diy-pro-pcb-3-7-..., linked to a Github issue opened in June.

Somehow, the source code for the new version has been overwritten by an older (CC-BY-NC) version, yet the issue has been left to rot, both on the support forum and on Github, letting me to think that the "openness" is mostly a posture to lure the HN crowd. Additionally, the -NC clause is definitely a deal breaker, and I should have investigated further before giving them my money.

(it sucks to air it out in public here, but apparently the AirGradient folks don't care much about issues raised on their own forum).

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Achim from AirGradient here. First of all, I appreciate your openness and I hope the following helps to clarify a few things:

1) All our monitor kits are licensed under CC-BY-SA (and not as mentioned above CC-BY-NC). There was a short period where we had them under NC license but since NC is not truely open-source we switched to the more permissive SA license. We wrote in more detail about this on our blog [1]

2) We are aware that our open-source firmware is currently lacking the quality level we would like to see because we have been very busy with the hardware side of the project. I do hope that in the coming months we will have more time to look after the firmware side and I already had a couple of calls with contributors in the last few days who are happy to help. It's definitely an area we need to improve.

We are currently setting up a focus group and I would love to have people included that might have a more critical view on the project. Please contact me if you would be interested to participate.

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/thoughts-on-licensing/

An easy first step would be to do a minimum of engagement with those people kindly putting effort into submitting PRs to the repo. You could even assign a community maintainer to help with testing and managing PRs and issues if you don't have the time.

Thank you. This is a good suggestion.

https://github.com/airgradienthq/arduino/blob/master/example...

The current version of the file mentioned in that thread says CC-BY-SA https://github.com/airgradienthq/arduino/blob/master/example...

(Though I don't understand why anybody would use CC-BY-SA for code, instead of a copyleft license designed for code)

Your comment about "disguised ad" also gave us some food for thought and I just wrote an article how we want to be transparent about our own product promotions and some changes we have implemented [1].

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/are-our-articles-disguised-...

> Somehow, the source code for the new version has been overwritten by an older (CC-BY-NC) version, yet the issue has been left to rot, both on the support forum and on Github, letting me to think that the "openness" is mostly a posture to lure the HN crowd. Additionally, the -NC clause is definitely a deal breaker, and I should have investigated further before giving them my money.

As an AirGradient customer, I just don't care about that. The software side isn't complicated, and I prefer running these things with ESPhome rather than their Airduino sketch anyway. The value of AirGradient for me is that they've curated a nice collection of sensors, designed a good enclosure and matching PCB mask for them, and are offering them at a very affordable price for DIYers.

+1, it just works, that is superior imho vs being as open as some are demanding (as an AirGradient customer).

> Well, although it is definitely more "open" than most, it feels like an afterthought.

Open enough!

Same. I buy my hardware from airgradient, I flash ESPHome onto it, I ignore the airgradient software (sorry airgradient!).

I appreciate that they are open with their hardware, and make it seamlessly easy to do the above, and also that they provide information into the industry like with this article. So I give them my money for their hardware rather than purchasing the components separately.

I got an AirGradient like 2 years ago and was very disappointed with the quality of the firmware. I wrote my own with Arduino which was good enough for ~2 years. But last week I found out about ESPHome, and they have a blueprint https://devices.esphome.io/devices/AirGradient-DIY that just works. My (slightly) customized version: https://gist.github.com/M3t0r/b81ce82796a2ec30f5470f1345f9ca...

Whatever you think of the openness or quality of the firmware, the hardware is open enough to just flash your own.

Am i the weird one? I don't think i even booted their firmware before flashing the unit with esphome (which is awesome one can juat do that)

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